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"You already know that, as we grow older, we become more prone to many kinds of ailments: cancers, heart disease, dementia, and others. Any number of private foundations are sponsoring research targeting one or more of these age-related conditions. Less common, though, are foundations that are taking on the aging process itself.

The Larry Ellison Medical Foundation used to be a leader in this area, but pulled the plug on such research in late 2013...

But Ellison was never alone in his "war on death." And two funders still searching for a modern-day fountain of youth are the Methuselah Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation. Indeed, they are partnering on finding treatments that basically make older people young again. "

"Longevity is a subject close to my heart, and I’ve been following the career of today’s guest for many years. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a visionary and general strategist in the field of gerontology who applies the concepts of planning, investment, and risk management to the science of aging. With his strategic approach, he’s created the seven “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” that offer a practical route to longer life.

Dr. de Grey may be the greatest activist for longevity of our time. He’s the Chief Science Officer for the SENS Research Foundation, a not-for-profit organization funding research into longevity around the world. He’s authored two books; Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that Could Reverse Human Aging in our Lifetime in 2008 and The Mitochondrial Free-Radical Theory of Aging, for which he received his PhD in 1999.

In today’s interview we examine popular longevity strategies such as caloric restriction and telomerase therapies, as well as those stemming from his research. His contrasting viewpoints offer insight compared to what you might see in the press."

"SENS Research Foundation is one of the few organizations persistently finding ways to move the needle, to speed things up, to bring more attention to the field. The scope of success here is at present only limited by funding: there are any number of scientists in the aging research community who would drop their present work in favor of SENS biotechnology to treat aging given the budget.

With that in mind, here is a little news for those who might have a few bitcoins left over after all the excitement of the past eighteen months or so..."

"Age defiance is a staggeringly lucrative ­industry. Last year the global anti-ageing ­market generated more than $280 billion. By 2018 it will hit $400 billion. A new tribe is ­taking advantage of sophisticated scientific breakthroughs... this appears to be only the beginning of the new age of ageing. It’s little wonder that the latest venture from Google, the most successful innovator on the planet, is ageing-related. Mere cosmetic enhancements are child’s play to Google, which is on an altogether more ambitious trajectory...

Larry Ellison, CEO of the computer tech company Oracle and the fifth wealthiest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine, is the money behind the ­Ellison ­Medical Foundation, an anti-ageing biomedical research centre. The Californian venture capitalist Paul F. Glenn has endowed hundreds of ­millions to life-expansion research at Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, MIT and Stanford. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and a Facebook board member, is a ­supporter of SENS, a research foundation ­specialising in rejuvenation treatments.

SENS is run by Aubrey de Grey, a British ­gerontologist who believes that the first person to live to 150 is already alive today – a view shared by federal treasurer Joe Hockey, who was ridiculed recently for making this exact claim while arguing the case for budget cuts.

“Rejuvenation biotechnologies are, very ­simply, medicines that restore the structure of the body to how it was in early adulthood, and thereby restore it to maximum physical and mental performance,” explains de Grey, who also co-founded the Methuselah – a foundation whose aim, through tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, is to create a world by 2030 in which 90-year-olds can be as healthy as 50-year-olds. “By restoring the molecular and cellular structure of the body to that of a young adult, we will necessarily restore its function, too, which constitutes reversing ageing. Thus, ­people will remain truly healthy for longer, postponing the ill health that inescapably accompanies old age today.”"

"Most people know that healthcare has rapidly become an information technology and health and medicine is changing exponentially.Just as technology is democratizing all aspects of life, no field is being disrupted more quickly than healthcare and the implications of digital will bring a trillion dollars worth of disruption to outdated diagnosis, treatment and delivery of healthcare. Moreover, the human race will live long enough soon to live forever as nanotechnology, robotics, Gene sequencing and AI cure age old problems."

Last month at the World Stem Cell Summit in San Antonio, TX, GEN’s editor-in-chief John Sterling moderated a panel discussion on “Regeneration Medicine: A New Era of Discovery and Innovation.” The following Q&A is based on some of the responses of several panel members.

"New scientific research on healing the body from within, may revolutionise the way we age, says Áilín Quinlan.

YOUTH may be wasted on the young, but it’s the holy grail for the ageing affluent. No longer willing to undergo an invasive nip-and-tuck, informed women are looking to the latest developments in science, which take an inside-out approach to ageing.

There’s a booming market in sophisticated anti-ageing procedures and products. Last year, the global market was worth €193bn. By 2018, that’s scheduled to be €280bn.

The research is being driven by some of the best scientific and business brains."

"Scientists may have hit upon a new way of extending the lifespan of living organisms - by activating a gene that destroys unhealthy cells. Researchers at the University of Bern found they were able to help flies live up to 60% longer by increasing the activity of a gene that targets damaged cells. If this could be transferred to humans, it could extend the average lifespan of people in developed countries like the US and the UK to beyond 120 years old."

Joao Pedro de Magalhaes and his team at the University of Liverpool sequenced the genome of the bowhead whale, the longest living mammal on earth. The team wanted to understand why they live so long and don't succumb to some of the same illnesses as humans do earlier in life.

Aubrey de Grey, the SENS Research Foundation's chief science officer and one of the leading voices on extending human life, said the "biology of aging badly needs studies like this."

"The field was revolutionised over 20 years ago when mutations were discovered that greatly postpone aging by emulating the metabolic response to famine, but that avenue has not delivered as much medical progress as hoped, and many of us are now pessimistic that it ever will," de Grey said. "Therefore, it is of high priority to look in other ways for simple genetic variations that underlie differences in longevity, and the approach taken by (co-author Michael) Keane et al. is among the most promising."

SENS Research Foundation is a partner of the Alliance for Aging Research's Healthspan Campaign. In this interview, SRF CEO Mike Kope discusses the Foundation's work and its implications for healthy human lifespans.

"There was a time – only a few years ago – when serious research into radical life extension was popularly considered to be completely insane. But the scientific grounds for thinking of aging as an unconquerable problem are evaporating quickly. There is no law of biology stating: “Humans shall not exceed the age of 120.” Instead, it is becoming clear that what holds back anti-aging research is institutional support, and thus: funding, laboratories, dedicated research teams, and so forth."

"The smell of coffee, and sounds of familiar voices permeated the air as I approached the registration desk for the SENS Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference in Santa Clara. Friendly faces and friends greet me, and I am reminded of at time almost exactly a year ago, when I attended SENS6 in Cambridge. I am directed to the breakfast area, where over a hundred individuals gather to catch up since they last saw each other."

"Last week the SENS Foundation put on the first ever Rejuvenation Biotechnology conference in Santa Clara. (“Rejuvenation” might be misleading. This is a conference on aging, not on spa treatments.) The SENS Foundation operates on the “belief that a world free of age-related disease is possible,” and the conference is a way to build a community around that belief."

"There were two momentous events on the night of August 23, 2014. First, the inaugural Rejuvenation Biotechnology conference drew to a close. Second, the largest earthquake in nearly 25 years hit the San Francisco Bay Area."

"Assume a single bacterium weighs one thousand billionth of a gram. If it, and each of its progeny, divides once every 20 minutes then the population will reach approximately 4000 times the mass of the earth in two days. Such is the power of exponential change."

"Consider this question: if I gave you the option to take a drug offering a 100 percent chance of survival to average life expectancy at which time you would certainly fall down dead, would you take it? Let’s say that age is 82. The other option is to take your chances and live to some undetermined point on a wider distribution around that age; you might only live to 60, you might live to 100, or you might fall somewhere in between."